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Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Vol. 2: The Mind
The second volume in a prominent new series on Buddhism and science, directed by the Dalai Lama and previously covered by the BBC.
Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics compiles classical Buddhist explorations of the nature of our material world, the human mind, logic, and phenomenology and puts them into context for the modern reader.
This ambitious four-volume series—a major resource for the history of ideas and especially the history of science and philosophy—has been conceived by and compiled under the visionary supervision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself. It is his view that the exploratory thinking of great Indian masters in the first millennium CE still has much that is of interest to us today, whether we are Buddhist or not. These volumes make those insights accessible.
This, the second volume in the series, focuses on the science of the mind. Readers are first introduced to Buddhist conceptions of mind and consciousness and then led through traditional presentations of mental phenomena to reveal a Buddhist vision of the inner world with fascinating implications for the contemporary disciplines of cognitive science, psychology, emotion research, and philosophy of mind. Major topics
-The distinction between sensory and conceptual processes and the pan-Indian notion of mental consciousness
-Mental factors—specific mental states such as attention, mindfulness, and compassion—and how they relate to one another
-The unique tantric theory of subtle levels of consciousness, their connection to the subtle energies, or “winds,” that flow through channels in the human body, and what happens to each when the body and mind dissolve at the time of death
-The seven types of mental states and how they impact the process of perception
-Styles of reasoning, which Buddhists understand as a valid avenue for acquiring sound knowledge
In the final section, the volume offers what might be called Buddhist contemplative science, a presentation of the classical Buddhist understanding of the psychology behind meditation and other forms of mental training.
To present these specific ideas and their rationale, the volume weaves together passages from the works of great Buddhist thinkers like Asanga, Vasubandhu, Nagarjuna, Dignaga, and Dharmakirti. His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s introduction outlines scientific and philosophical thinking in the history of the Buddhist tradition. To provide additional context for Western readers, each of the six major topics is introduced with an essay by John D. Dunne, distinguished professor of Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice at the University of Wisconsin. These essays connect the traditional material to contemporary debates and Western parallels, and provide helpful suggestions for further reading.
Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics compiles classical Buddhist explorations of the nature of our material world, the human mind, logic, and phenomenology and puts them into context for the modern reader.
This ambitious four-volume series—a major resource for the history of ideas and especially the history of science and philosophy—has been conceived by and compiled under the visionary supervision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself. It is his view that the exploratory thinking of great Indian masters in the first millennium CE still has much that is of interest to us today, whether we are Buddhist or not. These volumes make those insights accessible.
This, the second volume in the series, focuses on the science of the mind. Readers are first introduced to Buddhist conceptions of mind and consciousness and then led through traditional presentations of mental phenomena to reveal a Buddhist vision of the inner world with fascinating implications for the contemporary disciplines of cognitive science, psychology, emotion research, and philosophy of mind. Major topics
-The distinction between sensory and conceptual processes and the pan-Indian notion of mental consciousness
-Mental factors—specific mental states such as attention, mindfulness, and compassion—and how they relate to one another
-The unique tantric theory of subtle levels of consciousness, their connection to the subtle energies, or “winds,” that flow through channels in the human body, and what happens to each when the body and mind dissolve at the time of death
-The seven types of mental states and how they impact the process of perception
-Styles of reasoning, which Buddhists understand as a valid avenue for acquiring sound knowledge
In the final section, the volume offers what might be called Buddhist contemplative science, a presentation of the classical Buddhist understanding of the psychology behind meditation and other forms of mental training.
To present these specific ideas and their rationale, the volume weaves together passages from the works of great Buddhist thinkers like Asanga, Vasubandhu, Nagarjuna, Dignaga, and Dharmakirti. His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s introduction outlines scientific and philosophical thinking in the history of the Buddhist tradition. To provide additional context for Western readers, each of the six major topics is introduced with an essay by John D. Dunne, distinguished professor of Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice at the University of Wisconsin. These essays connect the traditional material to contemporary debates and Western parallels, and provide helpful suggestions for further reading.
- GenresBuddhismPhilosophy
576 pages, Hardcover
Published November 10, 2020
33 people are currently reading
125 people want to read
About the author
Dalai Lama XIV
1,554 books6,205 followersJetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso (born Lhamo Döndrub), the 14th Dalai Lama, is a practicing member of the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism and is influential as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the world's most famous Buddhist monk, and the leader of the exiled Tibetan government in India.
Tenzin Gyatso was the fifth of sixteen children born to a farming family. He was proclaimed the tulku (an Enlightened lama who has consciously decided to take rebirth) of the 13th Dalai Lama at the age of two.
On 17 November 1950, at the age of 15, he was enthroned as Tibet's ruler. Thus he became Tibet's most important political ruler just one month after the People's Republic of China's invasion of Tibet on 7 October 1950. In 1954, he went to Beijing to attempt peace talks with Mao Zedong and other leaders of the PRC. These talks ultimately failed.
After a failed uprising and the collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement in 1959, the Dalai Lama left for India, where he was active in establishing the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan Government in Exile) and in seeking to preserve Tibetan culture and education among the thousands of refugees who accompanied him.
Tenzin Gyatso is a charismatic figure and noted public speaker. This Dalai Lama is the first to travel to the West. There, he has helped to spread Buddhism and to promote the concepts of universal responsibility, secular ethics, and religious harmony.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, honorary Canadian citizenship in 2006, and the United States Congressional Gold Medal on 17 October 2007.
Tenzin Gyatso was the fifth of sixteen children born to a farming family. He was proclaimed the tulku (an Enlightened lama who has consciously decided to take rebirth) of the 13th Dalai Lama at the age of two.
On 17 November 1950, at the age of 15, he was enthroned as Tibet's ruler. Thus he became Tibet's most important political ruler just one month after the People's Republic of China's invasion of Tibet on 7 October 1950. In 1954, he went to Beijing to attempt peace talks with Mao Zedong and other leaders of the PRC. These talks ultimately failed.
After a failed uprising and the collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement in 1959, the Dalai Lama left for India, where he was active in establishing the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan Government in Exile) and in seeking to preserve Tibetan culture and education among the thousands of refugees who accompanied him.
Tenzin Gyatso is a charismatic figure and noted public speaker. This Dalai Lama is the first to travel to the West. There, he has helped to spread Buddhism and to promote the concepts of universal responsibility, secular ethics, and religious harmony.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, honorary Canadian citizenship in 2006, and the United States Congressional Gold Medal on 17 October 2007.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 30, 2018
An extremely thorough exploration of the Buddhist system used over the centuries to describe/explain the physical world and our interactions with it. So completely different from the western scientific description as to be difficult to reconcile initially, it incorporates concepts that most scientists would consider medieval at best. Yet it manages to incorporate them into a cohesive, if controversial, world view.
April 4, 2022
The definition of love is: a mental factor that, having observed sentient beings, thinks how wonderful it would be if they had happiness and wishes for them to have it. The Concentration Combining All Merit Sūtra says: “Love is to think ‘May all sentient beings be happy.’”
love (byams pa; maitrī). A mind wishing beings to be happy.
Read at the same time with several books about wisdom traditions, which felt like an extending mind exercise, weaving all these disparate threads or songs together into a symphony. I was stunned by this simple sentence in the introduction, and think it may say it all, or at least, lights up the wonder section of my brain: "Unlike the world’s other major religions, the Buddhist tradition’s canons contain an extremely large number of texts. Even in the case of the part translated into Tibetan, there are more than five thousand individual texts in over 320 large volumes." My wonder index boggles at the idea that there is so much parsing the words and teachings of Buddha, verging on the nearly ridiculous (like THE EIGHTY CONCEPTIONS INDICATIVE OF THE MINDS OF THE THREE LUMINOSITIES) but also reveling in the fact that so many people over a millenia have spent time with the words and teachings to give us their thoughts. It is the paradox of life and my wonder gauge wildly vacillates. The book is dense and sometimes too much so, but still a huge accomplishment to even try to synthesize the sources.
Having achieved bodily pliancy, there arises a great experience of bliss in the body through the force of the energy wind; this is called the bliss of bodily pliancy. When bodily pliancy initially arises, a great experience of bliss arises in the body through the force of the energy wind. When that [pliancy] initially arises, there appears the experience of mental joy, a great sense of mental bliss, attention to the presence of supreme mental joy, and fully manifest mental joy. After that, the power of the pliancy initially produced gradually becomes very subtle, and the body becomes endowed with shadow-like pliancy. Mental joy of any type is removed, and the mind becomes stabilized with calm abiding; and with an aspect of exceptional peace, the mind focuses on the object of meditation. Thereafter this novice yogi has attention and is reckoned as “one having attention.”
Thus, when identifying the nature of the mind, the sūtras teach that the mind is difficult to catch hold of: being intangible, it is weightless; like a firebrand spinning around, it does not rest; like the constantly moving waves of the ocean, it is unstable; like a forest fire, it ignites all deeds of body and speech; like a great river, the mind forcefully draws along a vast number of internal movements of awareness; and so forth.
Also, what we call peace is not simply a matter of not harming other people but is also clearly an expression of loving kindness. Since the root of human happiness is loving kindness, all the major religious traditions in the world have teachings that focus on the practice of loving kindness.
The definition of love is: a mental factor that, having observed sentient beings, thinks how wonderful it would be if they had happiness and wishes for them to have it. The Concentration Combining All Merit Sūtra says: “Love is to think ‘May all sentient beings be happy.’”
And with mental peace and happiness, one’s blood circulation and respiratory flow become even — based on which one has a healthy body, a long life, and so on.
One key issue is that the term mind in Western contexts suggests a single entity that endures over time and has various capacities, dispositions, or features. In contrast, the Buddhist sources cited by our authors maintain that mind is episodic, such that a mind (Sanskrit., citta) is a continuum (santāna) of mental moments, each moment causally emerging from the previous moment and acting as a cause for the subsequent moment. Each mind is thus a unique moment of consciousness (jñāna) or awareness (samvitti).
Turning now to the nature of mind, our authors focus on the most widely cited account — namely, that mind is clear and aware. Here, the term clear renders two distinct Sanskrit terms that evoke the phenomenal character of mind and also one of its essential properties. In relation to the Sanskrit term prakāśa, the Tibetan translation is most accurately rendered as “luminous,” in the sense that the mind “illuminates” or presents contents, much as a lamp illuminates whatever is nearby.
While the mind is clear — or perhaps “luminously clear,” to capture the two senses encompassed by that term — it is also aware. In general, this means that a mind or moment of consciousness has an epistemic character; that is, the mind does not simply illuminate, it also does so in an informative way.
love (byams pa; maitrī). A mind wishing beings to be happy.
Read at the same time with several books about wisdom traditions, which felt like an extending mind exercise, weaving all these disparate threads or songs together into a symphony. I was stunned by this simple sentence in the introduction, and think it may say it all, or at least, lights up the wonder section of my brain: "Unlike the world’s other major religions, the Buddhist tradition’s canons contain an extremely large number of texts. Even in the case of the part translated into Tibetan, there are more than five thousand individual texts in over 320 large volumes." My wonder index boggles at the idea that there is so much parsing the words and teachings of Buddha, verging on the nearly ridiculous (like THE EIGHTY CONCEPTIONS INDICATIVE OF THE MINDS OF THE THREE LUMINOSITIES) but also reveling in the fact that so many people over a millenia have spent time with the words and teachings to give us their thoughts. It is the paradox of life and my wonder gauge wildly vacillates. The book is dense and sometimes too much so, but still a huge accomplishment to even try to synthesize the sources.
Having achieved bodily pliancy, there arises a great experience of bliss in the body through the force of the energy wind; this is called the bliss of bodily pliancy. When bodily pliancy initially arises, a great experience of bliss arises in the body through the force of the energy wind. When that [pliancy] initially arises, there appears the experience of mental joy, a great sense of mental bliss, attention to the presence of supreme mental joy, and fully manifest mental joy. After that, the power of the pliancy initially produced gradually becomes very subtle, and the body becomes endowed with shadow-like pliancy. Mental joy of any type is removed, and the mind becomes stabilized with calm abiding; and with an aspect of exceptional peace, the mind focuses on the object of meditation. Thereafter this novice yogi has attention and is reckoned as “one having attention.”
Thus, when identifying the nature of the mind, the sūtras teach that the mind is difficult to catch hold of: being intangible, it is weightless; like a firebrand spinning around, it does not rest; like the constantly moving waves of the ocean, it is unstable; like a forest fire, it ignites all deeds of body and speech; like a great river, the mind forcefully draws along a vast number of internal movements of awareness; and so forth.
Also, what we call peace is not simply a matter of not harming other people but is also clearly an expression of loving kindness. Since the root of human happiness is loving kindness, all the major religious traditions in the world have teachings that focus on the practice of loving kindness.
The definition of love is: a mental factor that, having observed sentient beings, thinks how wonderful it would be if they had happiness and wishes for them to have it. The Concentration Combining All Merit Sūtra says: “Love is to think ‘May all sentient beings be happy.’”
And with mental peace and happiness, one’s blood circulation and respiratory flow become even — based on which one has a healthy body, a long life, and so on.
One key issue is that the term mind in Western contexts suggests a single entity that endures over time and has various capacities, dispositions, or features. In contrast, the Buddhist sources cited by our authors maintain that mind is episodic, such that a mind (Sanskrit., citta) is a continuum (santāna) of mental moments, each moment causally emerging from the previous moment and acting as a cause for the subsequent moment. Each mind is thus a unique moment of consciousness (jñāna) or awareness (samvitti).
Turning now to the nature of mind, our authors focus on the most widely cited account — namely, that mind is clear and aware. Here, the term clear renders two distinct Sanskrit terms that evoke the phenomenal character of mind and also one of its essential properties. In relation to the Sanskrit term prakāśa, the Tibetan translation is most accurately rendered as “luminous,” in the sense that the mind “illuminates” or presents contents, much as a lamp illuminates whatever is nearby.
While the mind is clear — or perhaps “luminously clear,” to capture the two senses encompassed by that term — it is also aware. In general, this means that a mind or moment of consciousness has an epistemic character; that is, the mind does not simply illuminate, it also does so in an informative way.
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